Club to GOP: Define 'electable'

11/21/12 1:08 PM EST

In response to signals that the GOP establishment is prepared to play a more aggressive role in 2014 Senate primaries, Club for Growth President Chris Chocola fires a shot across the bow in an op-ed published Wednesday.

In the wake of some missed opportunities to pick up seats in the U.S. Senate over the past few cycles, one tactical change floated by the GOP establishment is that the party apparatus and its affiliated Super PACs should play a more influential role in primaries to make sure that more “electable” candidates are nominated.

It is hard to imagine a bigger mistake…

Everyone wants to avoid the next Todd Akin or Christine O’Donnell, neither of whom received any support from the Club for Growth PAC. But the Republican establishment has a horrendous track record of accurately identifying which candidates are truly unelectable and which are not. Too often, party insiders mistakenly substitute the word “unelectable” for the word “conservative.”

Chocola, a former GOP congressman from Indiana, points to a litany of top, establishment-favored candidates who lost in 2012 and also to a rogue’s gallery of so-called ‘electable’ GOP House and Senate candidates who backfired in spectacular fashion in recent years: Dede Scozzafava, Arlen Specter, and Charlie Crist.

The venue for the op-ed is notable — the Kansas City Star, a Missouri-based paper with a big circulation in the back yards of Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, the incoming National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman, and Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt.

Blunt, a member of Senate leadership, and Moran both expressed support — however gingerly —- for the notion of greater national involvement in interviews with POLITICO’s Manu Raju last week.

Chocola’s message is a reminder that even the sweeping 2012 Senate losses haven’t resolved the intraparty conflicts that cost the GOP a handful of seats in the last two election cycles.

With the possibility of several primary challenges to GOP incumbents in 2014, as well as a handful of other attractive Democratic-held seats that could generate contentious GOP primaries, the balance struck between the national party and groups like CFG will likely determine whether the GOP has a shot at winning back the majority.